Digital Humanities: Reconstructing a 400-yr-old Sermon

Fascinating way to reconstruct and interpret a historical event. Kudos to all involved. In NT studies, how about something similar to reconstruct stories within narratives (e.g., Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s Areopagus sermon) or the performance of whole narratives (e.g., the Gospel of Mark being read out/performed in a meeting of early Christians)? I suppose that to some extent, film can do this (and has done this) in a less interactive way (see Mark Goodacre’s many posts on such films, incl. this one).

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project helps us to explore public preaching in early modern London, enabling us to experience a Paul’s Cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion. This Project uses architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to give us access experientially to a particular event from the past – the Paul’s Cross sermon John Donne delivered on Tuesday, November 5th, 1622.

These digital tools, customarily used by architects and designers to anticipate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that are not yet constructed, are here used to recreate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that have not existed for hundreds of years.